Listening With Your Skin

Listening With Your Skin

Audio-described and tactile tour with Emilie Conway at Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre

Wednesday 9 September 2026, at 1:00pm to 2:00pm

It’s a free event with limited places and pre booking is essential.

To book just call: 02822090 or email info@westcorkartscentre.com

Experience Dr. Siobhán McGibbon’s exhibition, – Love Beyond the Species and the Sexual – through a tour created and led by visually impaired artist and aesthetic accessibility consultant Emilie Conway. Designed from a blind and low-vision perspective, this tour offers a rich multisensory non-visual experience of the speculative world of Xenophon. Through Emilie’s live audio description and spatial guidance, visitors are invited to interact directly with tactile biomaterial sculptures and mycelial webs, feel sculpted forms and scale, and explore custom olfactory scents created with artist Frank Bloem.

Facilitators Biography – Emilie Conway
MUSICIAN – ARTIST – DISABILITY ACCESS ACTIVIST, CONSULTANT & CREATOR – SOLID SPACE SOUND SENSORY EXPERIENCES – ART PSYCHOTHERAPIST Emilie Conway is an award-winning vocal Jazz and multidisciplinary artist, access consultant, and creator Busy of Solid Space Sound—an innovative, multi-sensory approach to making visual art and cultural spaces vibrant, immersive, and fully accessible for blind and visually impaired audiences. Informed by her lived experience with visual impairment, Emilie blends rich verbal audio description with tactile, musical, spatial, and spoken-word elements to bring visual art off the wall and into the senses. An active international vocal jazz artist and composer, Emilie has delivered bespoke sensory and audio-described tours for major cultural institutions, including the National Gallery of Ireland, the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), The Ark, and the Irish Architecture Foundation and the Project Art Centre. Her pioneering approach emphasises the aesthetic value of blind Vi experience and perception, which she centres it in her creation of multi-sensory access Experiences. Her Work Has been supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. Alongside her artistic and access practice, Emilie is an accredited Art Psychotherapist (IACP) and the founder of DADA (Disabled Artists, Disabled Academics), advocating nationally and internationally for equity, disability rights, and access across the arts. In today’s multi sensory and audio -described tour at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Emilie guides visitors through Siobhan McGibbon’s exhibition using vivid verbal description, spatial orientation, material tactile references, and evocative soundscapes—inviting a deep, participative encounter with the form, texture, narrative, and physical presence of the artwork.More about Dr. Siobhan McGibbons exhibtion HERE

The development of this work has been supported by several residencies at Uillinn in recent years, each one contributing meaningfully to Siobhán’s research, collaborative practice, and the development of her unique visual language.

Supported by an Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon Project Award. Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre acknowledges the financial support of The Arts Council  / An Chomhairle Ealaíon in making exhibitions possible.